Enter the Spin Doctors : THE CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, By Greg Mitchell (Random House: $27.50; 582 pp.)
Sigal’s most recent book is “The Secret Defector” (HarperCollins). He teaches journalism at USC
“We don’t go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York–of being obliged to print both sides. We’re going to beat this son of a bitch Sinclair any way we can. . . . We’re going to kill him.”
The speaker: Kyle Palmer, Los Angeles Times political editor, to Turner Catledge of the New York Times.
The time: 1934, when socialist writer Upton Sinclair, who had just swept the Democratic primary for governor of California, threatened to beat handily the GOP candidate, Frank Merriam, in the November election.
Kyle Palmer, the pope of Southern California right-wing politics, was neither kidding nor exaggerating. Nor was he exceptional in his venom toward Upton Sinclair and his mass movement, End Poverty in California (EPIC). According to Greg Mitchell in his fascinating and valuable study, EPIC “was nothing less than a roundabout route to socialism.” On this point, “Political pundits, financial columnists, and White House aides, for once, agreed: Sinclair’s victory represented the high tide of radicalism in the United States.” This tide had to be pushed back, or California would suffocate under the weight of Sinclair’s “maggot-like horde” of supporters, as the Los Angeles Times called EPICers.
In 1934, a year racked by general strikes and epidemic unemployment, the maverick pamphleteer-novelist Sinclair–author of muckraking tracts like “The Jungle” and the most widely translated American writer abroad–was a menace not only to the so-called Vested Interests. Down deep, he embodied a revulsion felt by many Californians toward the capitalist system. EPIC’s program of production-for-use-not-profit, land colonies, barter exchanges and cooperation versus competition was a potentially deadly blow to the American Dream. It was subversive because it spoke to the misery of desperate, Depression-ruined Americans yearning for relief from the day-to-day savagery of a skewed, inefficient system that seemed to be failing everybody but the very rich. At its height, EPIC enrolled 100,000 members from San Diego to Sacramento, and its newspaper sold 2 million copies.
In “The Campaign of the Century,” Greg Mitchell has chosen to focus not on EPIC itself but “on the cataclysmic response to Sinclair’s emergence as the Democratic nominee.” Thus we learn relatively little about EPIC or about Sinclair, but a lot about the nuts and bolts of the “most astonishing . . . smear campaign ever directed against a major candidate.” Our present-day “media politics” with its emphasis on image over substance, was born in the ferocious, fraudulent anti-Sinclair campaign, says Mitchell.
A subtext of Mitchell’s book is how strongly adherents felt about Sinclair and EPIC. They “came from every strata, although nearly all were white. It was not . . . a poor people’s movement. Most of the activists were middle-class and middle-aged . . . Many were down-on-their-luck businessmen.” Any given EPIC club might include “Utopians, technocrats, Townsendites, progressive Republicans, New Deal Democrats, ex-Socialists and secret Communists, all united by a belief in a perfectible society.” No EPIC, aside from clerical staff, earned a cent from the movement. “Members paid a dollar, penny, or a collar button” to join; “Some EPICs hocked the gold fillings in their teeth to raise money.” Although broad-based and decentralized, “EPIC was far from democratic” and indifferent to unions. And Sinclair’s portrait occupied a holy place in many homes.
In any other state, EPIC might never have flown. But California’s populist tradition, open-mindedness (or wackiness), absence of party bosses or deep ethnic loyalties meant that a challenge to established authority was as relatively easy to mount as it was difficult to organize a counter-revolution. At first, the state’s wealthy were so rattled that their political representatives were caught completely off balance by Sinclair’s spectacular rise. Only loonies had expected him to win the primary, and nobody had been crazy enough to predict he would outpoll all six of his opponents together.
But like a great octopus, California’s Republicans and conservative Democrats, equally terrified of EPIC, slowly thrashed up from the murk of politics-as-usual to deal with the “enemy within.” “The prospect of a socialist governing the nation’s most volatile state,” says Mitchell, “sparked nothing less than a revolution in American politics.”
Spurred by “fear and desperation,” ad men like Albert Lasker and especially Clem Whittaker, hired conservative guns, broke the old rules and “virtually invented the modern media campaign.” Whittaker and his associate Leone Baxter introduced the radical idea that free-lance outsiders like themselves, not party chiefs, would “handle every aspect of a political campaign.” Whittaker’s “cozy relationship” with California’s 700 newspaper publishers meant that local editors were happy to run his press releases “as news stories–even as editorials.” The anti-Sinclair “lie factory” twisted and distorted; but worst of all, his enemies quoted from Upton Sinclair’s own works, in which he had attacked everything from wedded bliss (“marriage plus prostitution”) to religion (“a mighty fortress of graft”) and the Boy Scouts. After his defeat, Sinclair confessed wearily and with justice, “I talk too much. I write too much, too.”
By most accounts, Sinclair was a decent, generous, puritanical man of genuine sweetness. What his blurted half-jokes and honest indiscretions failed to supply, Hollywood and Madison Avenue concocted by way of movie propaganda and, probably even more effectively, radio shots–like an anti-Sinclair “One Man’s Family”-type series. Film studio bosses, alarmed by Sinclair’s not-very-serious threat to socialize movie production, colluded with what a Scripps-Howard reporter called a “reign of unreason bordering on hysteria.” Big-time screenwriters like Carey Wilson and directors like Felix Feist (later of “Peyton Place” fame) were enlisted or dragooned to produce Goebbelsesque films, often using faked footage, that drilled home the message: EPIC equals Armageddon. Studio workers were forced to contribute to Frank Merriam’s campaign. Very few Hollywood stars had the guts to refuse. (Holdouts included James Cagney and Jean Harlow.)
Law ‘n’ order also came to the rescue of the anti-Sinclair forces. Election officials, GOP activists and local district attorneys intimidated EPIC supporters away from the polls by challenging the credentials of at least 150,000 voters and threatening to arrest them. All across the state preachers thundered, “Go and Sinclair no more!” and Aimee Semple McPherson, hungry for respectability after her recent kidnaping hoax, turned against Sinclair, despite the pro-EPIC sympathies of her flock.
Finally, the Democrats themselves carved up EPIC. At first friendly to Sinclair, President Roosevelt, needing conservative support for his faltering New Deal, cut a deal with the Republicans. In return for Frank Merriam converting to a pallid form of New Dealism, the party dumped the divisive Sinclair. Frightened Democrats and “third party” anti-EPICers formed around a candidate named Haight, who may have drawn off enough votes to beat the insurgent–but not by all that much. Final results: Merriam 1,100,000; Sinclair 900,000; Haight 300,000. In defeat, Sinclair received twice as many votes as any previous Democratic candidate for governor.
EPIC soon disappeared in a backlash of internal Red-baiting. (The communists and socialists opposed EPIC, but the Communist Party also tried to take it over.) Sinclair stopped muckraking to write the “Lanny Budd” series of best-sellers. Waves of fright and self-interest quickly covered over EPIC’s writing in the sand. Today, who remembers it?
Later, Sinclair insisted that the EPIC campaign had “changed the whole reactionary tone of the state.” EPIC was “the acorn from which evolved the tree of whatever liberalism we have in California,” claimed state Supreme Court justice Stanley Mosk, a Sinclair supporter in ’34. And as a direct result of EPIC and the studio bosses’ much-resented bullying, “politics in Hollywood moved steadily to the left over the next few years.”
Of course, the Right learned, too. “A number of men who would become legends in California politics, on both sides of the ideological fence, virtually cut their teeth on the ’34 campaign,” writes Mitchell. These included Earl Warren (Merriam’s campaign manager), Asa Call, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown (sending what encoded messages to his son today?), Murray Chotiner, Augustus Hawkins, Cuthbert Olson–a whole generation of pols whose experience taught them just how powerful the rich, who own the media, can be when aroused.
Lessons for liberals are harder to come by in this sizzling, rambunctiously useful book. If we take note of this nation’s recent rash of insurgencies–from Carol Moseley Braun to Ross Perot–maybe one lesson is that nothing good ever completely dies, it just goes to sleep for a while.
BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Campaign of the Century,” see the Opinion section, Page 6.
